


let me hold this close (and keep it here with me)

by Blue_Rive



Series: Mechanisms Tumblr Drabbles [4]
Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Other, The Inherent Intimancy of Doing Maintenance, Tumblr Ask Box Fic, some experiments with flowery prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:35:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26686003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blue_Rive/pseuds/Blue_Rive
Summary: Based off an anonymous prompt on Tumblr- "if youre still taking fic requests i would like to be a self indulgent bastard and req a ts/raph fic because,, they 🥺💖🥰💝"
Relationships: Raphaella la Cognizi/The Toy Soldier
Series: Mechanisms Tumblr Drabbles [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1935754
Comments: 5
Kudos: 41
Collections: The Toy Soldier Has Rights





	let me hold this close (and keep it here with me)

Raphaella’s thoughts are fickle, fluttering things, impossible to catch. She’s not used to people being able to keep up with her, at least a bit. The Toy Soldier doesn’t know everything she’s talking about, but it listens in rapt attention when she talks, and asks her questions she hadn’t even thought of.

She’s an astrophysicist at heart, always looking towards the sky. It takes the time to learn more about space for her, and occasionally she trips across something it knew, or didn’t but is excited to learn about.

She told it once about the spacefaring behemoths, something akin to whales with alien species on them living in harmony, and its face had lit up. “Oh! They’re friends! I would love to have good friends like that! Tell me more about them?”- and she had, and later found it telling Marius all about it, bouncing up and down and eyes shining as it detailed the history and culture that had arisen.

Scientifically, it’s an enigma, a work of art. She wants to study its machinery, inspect every inch of its whirring gears and levers. She _has-_ traced her hand across carved wood, explored with the tips of her fingertips the places where panels opened, felt where Asclepius’ blueprints gave way to Byzantine brutality. It doesn’t work how it should, an automaton working and acting like a human, strings stretching like tendons and bellows breathing. Its eyes are painted on, but they move.

She can’t help but feel inexperienced, at first, always the new one of the crew. The Toy Soldier takes the time to tell her its tales, the hundreds and thousands of years of immortality, slipping into storytelling like a well-worn colonel’s uniform.

It trips over affection and the words ‘I love you’ go wooden in its mouth, but she swears to it that she’ll help it cut its rotten strings and repair its broken heart. It slips up a few times, calls her ‘angel’, but pulls itself to a halt before it can go that way; starts calling her by her name, listing off all her idiosyncrasies to remind itself that people are not interchangeable, that it can’t treat Raphaella as a replacement for a perceived lover that never really existed, not the way it thought.

Raphaella cares for people, but usually in a way that’s as fleeting as her thoughts. The Toy Soldier is immortal, too, and if she loves it, she has to figure out how to make it last, how to pin down her affection and build something worthwhile out of it. She’d lost the tendency to do that between the third and fourth mortal, there one day and gone the next, and she fails the first time she tries with it, but she cares enough to try and repair what broke, to try and be a better person; and eventually, together, they manage to get something right.


End file.
